Tag Archives: airlines

On Airlines, Hospitals, Blizzards and Flu Outbreaks

Posted on December 30, 2010 | 1 Comment

Here is a really interesting article comparing the airline industry to the public health system, with full service hospitals being the legacy carriers, serving everyone and subsidizing low fare services with high fare ones. Specialty hospitals are the upstart airlines, able to focus on only providing profitable services. And as they all cut capacity to remain profitable, what happens when crisis hits? We just saw what happens to airlines when a blizzard strikes; so what happens to hospitals when a pandemic hits?

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Posted in Business, Politics, Trends

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Terrorism: As Dangerous As A Tornado?

Posted on January 11, 2010 | 2 Comments

The Wall Street Journal this weekend ran a very interesting article about terrorism, and how incredibly unlikely it is for an American to die in a terrorist attack, and how Americans should maybe toughen up and look at the numbers instead of spending billions of dollars and millions of hours taking off their shoes at airports to prevent something that is statistically rare. The main article is here, and the sidebar that runs the numbers in detail (by Nate Silver!) is here.

The chance of an American dying in a terrorist attack is 1 in 3,000,000, or about the same as being killed by a tornado. Every day, 50 Americans are murdered, but we certainly aren’t spending the time and money to prevent those deaths that we are spending on the much less deadly terrorism. Obviously, this is a complicated issue that can’t be decided purely on statistics, but the point that we are maybe not focusing on the right things, and that we are maybe giving the terrorists a bigger psychic role than they deserve, is a good one.

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Posted in Politics, Pop culture, Trends

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